Lotus Notes Migration-Your FAQs Answered

1. What are the factors I need to consider before I embark on the Office 365 migration journey?

There are quite a few factors that influence the approach to Office 365 migration, here are the top 5:

Scope of the Migration: What do you want to migrate? Is it only mails or do you need to remediate applications or do you want to move them as well?

Size of the Environment: Get the numbers right – the number of users to be migrated, the number of mailboxes to be migrated and the size of the mailboxes, all play a major role in your path from Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration.

Organization Context: How deep-rooted is Notes platform in your organization? Have you been using it for emailing and scheduling? Do you have applications and do these applications integrate with Line of Business applications? Do you have systems of record like SAP that the Notes platform is integrated with?

Infrastructure Complexity: How is your organization running? Do you have Fat Servers working on their own? Is your organization globally or centrally located? Do you have clusters and domains dispersed based on your location?

Resources: This includes your resources from infrastructure to your people. How prepared are you in the change management process and how well are your resources available to support you in Office 365 migration.

2. What is the approach I need to adopt in migrating mail to Office 365?

You have not one, but three ways to go about it. Do you want to move over to the new platform all at once? Then just “Cutover”.

Want to take some time and migrate in a phased manner, based on Business Unit/country/department/ teams at different points in time? Then go for a “Staged” migration.

3. Are there any tools in place to help in Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration?

From our experience, we have found that third party tools like BinaryTree, Quest, MigrationWhiz, DellOnDemand are a cut above the rest. Overall Binary tree provides sound stability and data migration, and is effective in handling mail flow.

We at Maarga, have developed our internal IP tools ‘Quickr migrater’, ‘SharePointfastrack’ to accelerate delivery in Lotus Notes migration to Office 365.

4. We have Notes applications that send emails, how will they be handled during migration?

Here are some options for you:

Set rules for forwarding mails

Retain the existing Notes applications as is or

Modify the applications to connect to O365 mails, as mail forwarding may behave differently the in Notes platform

5. What do we do with applications that are integrated with mails?

Several Notes applications end up having deep dependency on mail communication. The choices we are left with:

Retire such applications if they can be done away with

Remediate applications to be working with the new mail infrastructure

Migrate the applications as well to SharePoint Online

6. What is the typical mailbox size and what is the maximum size we need to plan for?

Every employee within the enterprise has a mailbox size cap ranging between 1 and 2 GB per user. This cap, however is not enforced on leadership teams and they end up with mailbox size as much as 40 – 50 GB.

The recommended approach is to consider the super large mailboxes as outliers and have a separate approach to migrate them while bulk of the users get migrated via the standard migration process.

For larger mailboxes, one approach is to archive the historical mails and migrate only after a cut off date thereby reducing the payload for migration. Also, watch out for encrypted emails, for they are tricky as tools do not migrate such mails out of the box.

7. Is my data safe when moving from ‘on prem’ Notes to the Cloud?

This is recurring cause of concern about Cloud as an infrastructure service and not specific to Lotus Notes migration alone. Cloud security has matured and large enterprises have moved data including critical financial data, and Microsoft is focused on addressing this with the Microsoft Trust Center.

8. What are the key benefits of moving from Lotus Notes to Office 365?

There are 3 stakeholders who gain tangible benefits in Lotus Notes migration to Office 365:

IT Teams: Your IT teams do not have to worry about maintaining infrastructure ‘on prem’, or worry about time and availability. The IT team would also be equipped to focus on projects that improve the end user experience.

End Users: With new age solutions that are Cloud and mobile ready, you can equip your end users on the go, improve productivity and also embrace collaboration with greater force.

The Enterprise: Your organization saves money. You can win a significant reduction in Capex with reduced need for local infrastructure and also manage operational expenditure with a pay as you use model. No more upfront payout for the whole year, you can pay on a monthly basis easing cash flow demands.

9.How do I budget for a migration project: Capex, Opex?

Budgeting has several line items:

Migration Infrastructure

Migration Tool licenses

Target environment licenses

Migration project team

IT team re-training and re-skilling

End user training and adoption

Post migration support

Post migration operational expenditure (opex) to pay for licenses, support and add on products

Also note that you will save money by downsizing the IBM infrastructure and through reduced storage costs (most expensive line item is storage) and lesser IBM license costs

10. Post Office 365 migration, can Notes infrastructure be shut down completely? When can the Domino infrastructure be decommissioned?

Lotus Notes migration to Office 365 is not as simple as plug and play. While the migration may happen smoothly, both the platforms need to co-exist for a considerable period of time before the Notes infrastructure can be shut down completely.

The Domino infrastructure can be decommissioned only after your applications are migrated or moved and remediated. Also, if for legal or compliance reasons, you choose to retain historical data in Lotus Notes, then we cannot abruptly stop the Domino infrastructure.

Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration on the cards? Connect the dots with Maarga and get the complete picture.

Maarga is a boutique consultancy with deep expertise in Lotus Notes migration, digital transformation and enterprise collaboration. Reach out to Maarga with your needs at Sales@maargasystems.com